Who is Peter Weinberger?

2/13/2003 – Do you remember the Ken Thompson's Endgame CDs that ChessBase published some
years ago? They were the first databases of five-pieces endings that reached
the general public, precursors to the Nalimov Tablebases we have today (Fritz
Endgame Turbo). If you still have a copy of the original CDs you may want
to take a closer look at the artwork. It contains one of the most famous running
gags of the US computer community. Here is the full story.

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The CD artwork was supplied by the author Ken Thompson of the Bell Laboratories,
and uses a detail from Michaelangelo's famous picture of "Hand of God"
on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel in Rome.

If you look carefully you will see that in the bend of the wrist there is a
strange marking.

It turns out that it is a human face, one that anyone at the Bell Labs would
intantly recognise.

It is Peter J. Weinberger, at the time a head of the Computer Science Research
Center at Bell Labs.

There is a long story behind the use of Peter's face on the Thompson Endgame
CD is revealed in a book called "Beyond
Photography", which went out of print in 1995 but has become a cult-classic,
cherished by geeks and gurus for its irreverent distortions of the pictures
of well-known computer scientists that all worked at Bell Labs at the time the
book first came out. Peter Weinberger was one of the first victims of image
transformations.

This is the original portrait of Peter Weinberger, taken when he was raised
to the rank of department head and was careless enough to leave floating around.
Soon Peter's picture appeared and reappeared in the most unlikely places in
the lab.

Above you can see Weinberger's portrait on a watertower on the grounds of the
Bell Laboratories.

Even chips and circuit boards produced at the laboratories contained the ubiquitous
protrait.

The above version appeared in the AT&T Technical Journal in March 1987.
If you want to know where else Peter Weinberger has made his appearence you
will find a comprehensive list here.
The article also gives you an impression of how the scientists at one of the
most prestigious laboratories in the world use their formidable creative energies.

See also

3/27/2018 – Sergey Karjkin didn't succeed in posing serious problems for Ding Liren and after, what he called, a "terrible blunder", he had to scramble to save a draw. That left Caruana in great shape to win the tournament. Mamedyarov struggled to find winning chances with black against Kramnik, but in the end that game ended drawn as well. Caruana, needing only a draw, was in command against Grischuk and even won the game to finish in clear first by a full point! | Photo and drawings by World Chess

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1/28/2018 – Magnus Carlsen won the 80th Tata Steel Masters which was decided in a blitz tiebreak over Dutch number one Anish Giri. The players contested two blitz games with 5 minutes plus 3 seconds per move, with no sudden death Armageddon game needed. Vidit played solidly to earn a draw that was enough to win the Challengers, as Korobov could not manage to pull off a win with black on-demand. | Photo: Alina l'Ami TataSteelChess.com

Video

The setup for White recommended by Valeri Lilov is solid and easy to play – the thematic moves are almost always the same ones: Nge2, 0-0, Bg5 (or Be3), Nd5, Qd2. Later, according to Black’s setup, things continue with f4 or even Rac1, b4 and play on the queenside. Starting with the classic Botvinnik-Spassky, Leiden 1970, the author describes this universally employable setup in 7 videos (+ intro and conclusion).